“These things are ultimately connected to men’s and women’s roles in society: who’s active and passive.”
“While the woman plays an integral part in the narrative, in terms of characterisation, the focus is on the trauma of the man, not what the woman has experienced,” explains Dr Miriam Kent, a lecturer on film and media studies at the University of East Anglia who specialises in gender and identity representations in superhero stories. She has died to give our hero something to do. So begins a tale of revenge in which Green Lantern reaches new heights of superheroism, but his female companion can’t make any decisions or enjoy any character progression, because she’s been sacrificed. “Fridging”, or “Women in Refrigerators” (WiR), is shorthand for a persistent sexist trope, named after a 1994 Green Lantern comic in which the hero returns home to find that his nemesis, Major Force, has murdered his girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt and stuffed her corpse into a fridge. The female character is killed in a road accident, but has she been … fridged? From then on, the drama follows her husband, played by John Simm, and his quest to find out about her secret life. In the opening scene of ITV’s new drama Strangers, Dervla Kirwan dies.
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